It’s not a wrap until it’s been blocked

Yesterday we talked about the Squared Off Shawl pattern. Knitting with lace is interesting because it’s a type of knitting you must block. Especially if you’re doing a lace pattern. You need to open up all the eyelets and align the pattern. If your knitting doesn’t look good while you’re knitting, don’t despair! It may just need a good, hard, blocking.

My Squared Off Shawl before blocking. Lace is definitely something you need to block so no worries if it looks like this.

I know we’ve talked about blocking before and how amazing it is, but we need to go over how to block your garments. A lot of the different blocking techniques depend on your space, your time, what you’re trying to achieve with your blocking, and if you have a place where your garment will be left alone. All these techniques are intertwined together and some are better than others for different situations.

Post steam blocking! It looks so much better!! You can now see the pattern and all the hard work from knitting and purling this lovely pattern.

I was curious to see how It’s a Wrap would block out because it’s lace knit up with a cotton acrylic blend. Acrylic will relax completely, but cotton doesn’t normally change too much when it’s blocked because, by nature, it’s a less flexible fiber.

With steam blocking, the shawl laid flat and kept its stitch definition, and relaxed a bit, but not as much as a pure acrylic. This means when you block It’s a Wrap into a shape, it will keep that shape and you will need to re-block much less often. Cotton is a less malleable fiber that likes to stay in the shape it was knit into and this factors into what I said earlier about what you want the fiber to do. If you’ve knit something a little too short, you can block it longer. Usually you can get length or width from blocking a garment, but not both. With the cotton, the garment is going to stay how you knit it. You’ll be able to have those sharp shawl edges and open eyelets without compromising the structure of the shawl.

My swatch before blocking. You really cannot even tell what shape it is, it’s got an interesting ruffle effect happening.

With wet blocking it was a little easier to manipulate the dimensions of the garment. Wet blocking takes space, time, and you must be able to lay it in a place where it won’t be disturbed for a day or two. You completely submerge the garment then gently squeeze the water out. Pin it to the dimensions you want. While you can manipulate this fiber, it keeps its shape more than wool or acrylic, so double check your gauge before starting if you’re knitting a sweater or something that needs to be fitted. After wet blocking It’s a Wrap yarn, the swatch was more relaxed than steam blocking and still retained its ‘strength’. I felt like I could have tugged and pulled it in different directions and it would stretch, but not become disfigured.

After wet blocking the swatch lays completely flat and you can clearly see it’s a square.

Overall, I was very impressed with the ability of It’s a Wrap to blend the stability of cotton with the softness and pliability of acrylic. All the while, keeping a machine washable yarn that makes a beautiful garment.

About Michelle Nguyen

Michelle Nguyen is founder and creative director of Stitch Please Yarns. She originally got into the fiber arts business writing about knitting at her blog Stitches be Slippin, and now, also writes for KNITmuch.com.

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